Newest

It was a tense, uncomfortable ride to the Marine base at Quantico. The Land Rover was built to accommodate four people, but in this case, an entire continent might not have been enough room for everybody’s satisfaction.
Major Hawthorn drove under protest. Every tendon in his body was strained to breaking point in an effort to keep himself under control. His gun holster stayed on the dashboard, unbuttoned, just in case. It didn’t seem to bother Gabriel, who occupied one of the rear seats as though it were a throne, and gave no sign of discomfort at even the biggest bumps and jars.
Colonel Obrin was unresponsive. He rocked from side to side, lost to his own nightmares of shame and guilt. All the defences he’d built up over the years were torn through, stripped away, and he found himself adrift in an ocean of feelings which he could no longer repress.
And Gina… Gina stared out the window and chewed her bottom lip until it was raw. Why couldn’t she tell him? Maybe if he knew, he’d be– he might not–
She shook herself out of it. No time for circular thinking. There were other things to talk about, quite important things.
Closing her eyes, Gina reached out. She touched the calm, controlled basin of Gabriel’s thoughts, and he rose to meet her.You have something that doesn’t belongs to you, she said, and let him feel some of the anger and pain she’d been carrying around, locked down deep inside herself. Letting that poison fuel her. Give it back. Now.Gina, there’s–Give me back what you stole! she snapped. No discussion, no argument, hand it over or I swear to God I’ll take it from you!
Taken aback by her ferocity, Gabriel reeled, cowed into silence. He observed her for a moment. Then, she felt it begin it happen.
First was a knock on the door to her brain, asking permission to go inside. That was how far she’d come. Gabriel had to ask. With a little glow of satisfaction, she invited him in, and they went to work together. Not a word was exchanged, or necessary.
The piece of him inside her brain came unstitched, disconnected, and was taken away. The ever-present sense of him in her brain gradually faded to nothing. There was a moment of awful emptiness, looking down the yawning hole in her self, until Gabriel offered up what he’d kept for so long. It slotted into place without any effort at all. It knew where it belonged.
Completeness washed over her. It was a feeling she hadn’t experienced in… Ever. She didn’t know what she had until it was gone. Overwhelming contentment filled her up, which Gina could only compare to sinking into a hot bath after a long day full of bruises. The edges were raw, still, and it didn’t fit quite as perfectly as before, but it would heal.Thank you, she told him.Don’t. I shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. It was… childish. Selfish.
Gina raised her mental eyebrows. That doesn’t sound like you. Are you feeling okay?
Dismissively, I’ve been doing some thinking, since I met you.If it’s true you were born here, she pointed out, then you are only fourteen and a bit years old.
Looking back on that thought, Gina wished she’d never had it. It made her stomach turn. At least he looked like a grown man, was one in a physical sense, so she could deliberately forget the rest.
Her bottom lip hurt. Her teeth were digging into it again. She picked her words hesitantly, syllable by syllable, each one followed by a heavy pause.Gabriel, there’s something I need to tell you.Later, he replied. We’re here.
Her eyes flicked to the screen showing the outside camera feed. It was true. A heavy chain-link fence blocked their way, topped with razor-wire, and the actual entrance was nowhere in sight. Not through a howling dust storm. She wondered how they were going to go around it, until Major Hawthorn hit the throttle and knocked down a whole section of fence by sheer weight of vehicle. Steel crunched as the Land Rover rolled over it. Even the big spool of concertina razors failed to leave an impression on the Rover’s chunky, armoured tires.
The moldering skeleton of the Marine base at Quantico rose from the dust, long-abandoned but mostly intact. An impressive collection of concrete boxes, prefab metal sheds, and deceptively normal-looking office buildings. Great drifts of sand had gathered in the lee of the motor pools, their doors left open fourteen years ago as the last evacuees hurried to safety. There was nowhere really convenient to park.
“That building, please,” Gabriel said out loud. He pointed to one of the offices on the screen, nondescript and without a label. “Get as close as you can.”
Hawthorn nodded. “Say no more.”
He drove into the lobby through several panes of sheet glass, parked on top of a delicate carbon-fibre fountain, and popped the hatch to let everyone out at their convenience.

***

They blazed a trail through the dust and decay, over the crumbled remains of potted trees and other irradiated clutter, left behind during the hasty evacuation and never picked up again. Gina saw sheets of paper. Bits of long-dead electronics. Even whole antique computers remained on the reception desk, not deemed important enough to salvage. It gave the place a sad, lonely atmosphere.
A bronze plaque along the wall proclaimed this building to be the John Dearborne Ctr. of Advanced MCorps Research, constructed proudly in 2069. It hammered in a final coffin-nail of irony with its motto: “Forever loyal, forever prepared.”
Gabriel led them to a bank of elevators along the lobby’s south wall. The doors opened for him without a fuss. What security remained, running on back-up power, obeyed him at the touch of a button. He seemed to know the codes to every lock, every system — and where that wasn’t enough he had Colonel Obrin’s biometrics within arm’s reach.
The multi-function lock beeped as it recognised the Colonel’s fingerprint and passcode. A hidden control panel flipped up to reveal a new set of buttons in addition to the nine normal floors. These were all marked by the letter S and plunged into negative numbers, as many as twelve stories below ground level.
Gabriel didn’t hesitate in choosing one. It made a crunchy, crumbling noise as he pressed it, but the little light still came on and the doors closed faithfully.
“Fascinating place,” he said as the carriage began to move, sinking slowly into the Earth. “You can almost taste the history, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Why are we here?” asked Major Hawthorn impatiently, beating Gina to the punch.
“Our world is about to end, Major. It would be a terrible waste if we didn’t visit the place where it began.”Give me strength, thought Gina, casting her eyes heavenwards, forcing her clenched fingers to relax. Part of her wanted nothing more than to slap that horrible serenity out of him.
Out loud she said, “Look, Gabriel… The world is what it is. Nobody’s ever needed to reset the clock on it before, and we’ve been doing all right, haven’t we? As a species?” She held his gaze when he looked at her. “We keep surviving. It’s what we’re good at.”
“I didn’t do this on a Sunday-afternoon whim, Gina. I’ve thought about all of that. What right do I have to decide where things went wrong, where it all went off the path, and so on. When you start thinking that way, what right does anyone have to anything? People do what they do because they can. I can do this, so I’ve done it. If there’s anyone out there who wants to judge me, they’re welcome.”
“Then why did you pick the name ‘Gabriel?'” she wondered aloud. “I thought you had a bit of religion in you.”
“I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.” He grinned. “You don’t think that’s even a little fitting?”
Hawthorn gave a contemptuous snort. “And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season. Are you talking to somebody named Zacharias about his future offspring? No? Then don’t cherry-pick scripture around me!”
“Major, Major, Major,” sighed Gabriel, “you have such a depressingly literal mind.” He sent Hawthorn a wan little smile over the shoulder. “By the way, if you did what you’re thinking about doing, you might end up hitting someone by accident who isn’t functionally immortal. And that would be no fun at all, would it?”
“So stop me,” Hawthorn snarled.
“Stop you, when nothing in the here and now is going to matter in a day or two? No, I don’t think I’ll bother. Live with the consequences while you can.”
So calmly delivered, that speech, but it sent shivers all down Gina’s spine. She was still looking for a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It seemed to be getting further and further away.
The elevator gave a ding when it arrived, ten levels below-ground. The doors opened, grinding like heavy boots on gravel. Everyone trailed along in Gabriel’s wake.
The hallway outside the elevators could’ve belonged to any hospital on the planet: inoffensive, pastel, floored in vinyl and smelling faintly of disinfectant. The bare walls offered nothing in the way of decoration. The only break in their monotony was a row of windows looking out over some kind of training area.
It was a big rectangle of concrete in the finest traditions of military architecture. Ancient — by technological standards — VR pods lined the walls, rigged up with fluid pipes and other complicated devices which modern rigs had dropped by the wayside. Bulky control panels sat beside each one, so the operators could review a million different facts at a glance.
In the middle of the room stood something which Gina could only describe as the most sadistic-looking dentist’s chair in the history of oral hygiene. It bristled with needles, drills, blades and other mysterious attachments which looked less like medical equipment and more the tools of a butcher.
“The operating room,” Gabriel explained. “Where they first used Hephaestus to… To…”
He stopped halfway through the door. A bubble of joy surged into Gina’s heart when she saw why.
In the middle of it all, sitting cross-legged on the floor and field-stripping a rifle with his eyes closed, was Bomber.
For the first time today, maybe ever, Gina saw genuine surprise on Gabriel’s face. There was something deeply satisfying about that. Petty, maybe, but delightful all the same.
“The gang’s all here, huh?” Bomber said loudly as he slotted the bits of metal and plastic together once more. “I guess it’s time we sort some things out once and for all.”

***

The two men stared at each other from across the room. They were like artillery pieces taking aim. Bomber remained expressionless, still as a statue, while Gabriel went from shock to uncertainty to tightly-leashed anger.
There was one odd thing. When Gina reached out to Bomber, to speak to him mentally, she found… nothing. Not even a wall of telepathy avoidance, just empty space where thoughts and feelings were supposed to be. As if he didn’t exist. She shivered, wondering what he did to himself to make that happen.
“I don’t know what you’re doing here, Dusther, but you’re not getting in my way,” Gabriel pronounced. “Not today.”
“So stop me.”
Gabriel didn’t need encouragement. His mind lashed out like a battering ram, and Gina caught it too late to react. The sheer force of it sent her reeling, catching herself against the glass. The room spun around her. She focussed through it, though, searched for Bomber in a panic. She heard herself shout, “No!”
He hadn’t moved an inch. He stood in the same spot, unbowed, and flickered at the edges. It was a hologram…
“That’s why I can’t sense you,” Gabriel chuckled. “Clever.”
“Projector’s in pretty good shape,” said Bomber, and the corners of his mouth twitched, trying to remember how to smile. “Just needed some tender lovin’ care, is all.”
“You can’t hide from me forever, you know.”
“Don’t need to. Just for long enough.” He paused a moment. “Is Gina with you?”
So he couldn’t see. Gabriel picked up on it, too; he moved from side to side, but Bomber’s eyes stayed firmly on the doorway. When Gina threatened to open her mouth, Gabriel reached back and shushed her.
“What exactly are you hoping to accomplish here, Dusther?” he demanded. “You’re too late. You can’t stop what’s already begun.”
“You’re flatterin’ yourself, Gabe. You always think you’re the target.”
“What do you mean?”
No answer. The hologram fizzled out, leaving the room quiet and empty, without a hint as to where Bomber really was. Not a pile of dust or sheet of paper looked like it had been moved in years. That only seemed to feed Gabriel’s rage as he strode down the steps.
“How long has he been here?” he asked Gina and Hawthorn.
They looked at each other and, in unison, gave a massive shrug.
Gabriel hissed out a breath through his nose. His search through the years of detritus in the operating room didn’t reveal anything about Bomber’s location or his plans. The little control room up on the previous floor, looking down on Gabriel with its tiny, opaque windows, was the same. No signs of life that either he or Gina could sense.
“He’ll have rigged some kind of remote control. He wants me to waste time trying to track him down.” He snapped his fingers, coming to a decision. “I was hoping we could take our time, but it looks like I need to cut this field trip short. Come with me. I think you’ll find the next level very education… al…” He trailed off in mid-sentence as he turned around. “Where’s Obrin?”
Gina and Hawthorn glanced around the hallway. There was no trace of the Colonel. He’d seen his opportunity to run and taken it. Hawthorn started to laugh. It struck Gina as funny, too, until she felt the turn of Gabriel’s thoughts.
“You’ve got no Goddamn idea what’s down here,” he snapped as he passed them at a dead run, rushing into the stairwell.
Hawthorn stared after him, at the door flapping on its hinges, and said, “Should we go…?”
Gina nodded in a daze. “Yeah. We should.”
They hurried down the steps to the minus-eleventh floor, dreading what they might find.
Their first discovery was a heavy security door, complete with card lock, ripped from its hinges and lying in the middle of the hallway. The damage looked old. The torn metal edges had had time to grow rust. Gingerly, Gina stepped over the wreckage to explore.
A grid of cramped passages joined up a number of chambers, but unlike the floor above, these were conspicuously lacking in windows. There was something furtive about the way the halls were built. That feeling continued in the first room she popped her head into, some kind of guarded anteroom to a walk-in medical freezer. No one guarded it now, and the freezer had been cleaned out a long time ago. Just as well. It looked like the kind of storage room where you didn’t want to know the contents, because it was not going to be anything wholesome or good.
“I think he went this way,” said Hawthorn, touching her arm.
The first door in that direction opened onto a laboratory. Again, Gina got the sense that this was not a place where they did nice inoffensive things with pipettes and petri dishes. Three glass-walled vats were bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, sprouting a dizzying variety of tubes and electronics at the top and base. The glass was cracked and holed. Bullet-holes, she realised, with matching damage bored into the wall. Whatever had been in those vats, they’d made sure to shoot it before pulling out.
Indeed, something still remained in one of them. A dark, slumped shape, its bottom half bathing in a layer of cyan-coloured sludge. Gina could make out two elongated arms covered in patchy, black fur. Here and there, bits of bare skin showed bulging muscle, tight veins forced up against the skin. The body was criss-crossed with scalpel scars and still bristled with bits of implanted electronics. The creature looked and smelled like it had been trying to decompose for a while, but the process hadn’t quite caught on.
“What the fuck is that?” Gina hissed.
“I think it used to be a chimp,” Hawthorn replied, shaken and a little nauseous. “Animal testing.”
“God. What have they done to it?”
The Major shook his head grimly. “The real question is, why? There’s plenty of humans who’d volunteer.”
A noise down the hall cut the discussion short. Gina and Hawthorn shared a look of mutual understanding and ran to see what was going on.

***

“I did have a thought,” Gina whispered to Hawthorn as they slowed down, overcome by a sudden case of caution. The knocking and banging was a lot louder here, and some of the corridors looked damaged. Holes had been torn into the wall. A pipework ruin stuck out of them, all bent and ripped to pieces. The air smelled old and stale. Some of this stuff must’ve belonged to the air filtration system, now thoroughly put out of business.
Hawthorn said, “What’s your thought, Gina?”
“Andrew… Can I call you Andrew?” He gave her a curt nod. “I keep thinking that they shot out all three of those vats, but only one of them had anything in it.”
Swallowing a stab of fear, he shook off that train of thought and clutched his gun a little tighter. “It could be Colonel Obrin.”
Gina gave it some thought. All her memories of the Colonel had gone sour. Now that she knew about the blood on his hands, it made her sick. On the other hand, if Gabriel got his way, none of it would matter. Colonel Obrin would be absolved of his sins. Depending on how you looked at it.
Gina wasn’t sure she saw it that way.
The whole concept was still so strange and overwhelming; Gina could barely wrap her head around it. In a matter of days, she and everything she knew would cease to exist.
She asked, “Would you be that much happier to see Obrin?”
“I don’t think he’d try to hurt us.”
“I know. It’s the other way round that I’m worried about.”
Her tone was as cold and implacable as a Siberian winter. If she were ever going to feel justified in using her powers to truly hurt someone, ripping their mind out through their ears, Keith Obrin would be the man. She might hate herself for it, but she would cope.
Hawthorn suppressed an attack of the icy shivers and hissed, “I really wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”
They inched closer and closer to the open doorway, the actual door lying off its hinges just outside. They finally reached the threshold. Together, Gina and Major Hawthorn dove through, prepared for whatever lay on the other side.
They found Bomber.
He was throwing entire file cabinets around like they weighed nothing at all. Laminated paper covered the floor, sometimes sealed in yellow plastic folders. All the furniture — desks, chairs, computers and all the other odds and ends of an admin office — had been kicked out of the way to give Bomber better access. As Gina watched, he tore a drawer out of another cabinet, turned it upside down and shook a stack of folders out onto the floor. A few cursory glances seemed enough to tell him it wasn’t what he was looking for.
“Bomber?” Gina asked, unsure whether she should go to him or not. A nugget of fear pulsed in her heart. She tried to reach out to him, but recoiled when she got close. His mind was a hurricane of emotion, powerful beyond words. Gina was only safe as long as she kept her distance.
“Can’t talk,” he replied. Yet another drawer squeaked as it was ripped off its runners. “Almost got it.”Oh-kay, thought Gina, hurt and encouraged at the same time. Not the reunion she would’ve wanted, but at least he was responsive.
“What are you looking for?” she asked with exaggerated friendliness.
Moving to the second-to-last cabinet, Bomber tore into it like a man possessed. He threw all the files across the floor. In a few seconds he’d analysed every title in view, and selected one folder among the multitudes. He bent down, fished it carefully out of the pile.
“This.”
The name stamped across the front of the folder was, ‘Project Hephaestus Candidate Generation.’
“What is it?”
“The beginning,” he said, holding the plastic in both hands. They trembled as he flipped through the pages.
Hawthorn made his way over, through the scattered papers, and took the file from Bomber’s unresisting hands. He read it bit by bit, and Gina mentally read along with him.
She almost didn’t need to. The hard-copy photographs told enough of the story by themselves.
There were several images of a human egg being artificially fertilised. Next was a row of tiny foetuses, each growing in its own little fluid tank. Babies in incubators. Children sitting at classroom desks, all in military uniform. Each image showed fewer and fewer of them until, at adolescence, only a handful remained. A slim teenage Bomber stood at attention on the far left. Gina recognised some of the other faces from his memories. Caroline Yang, Tim Dujardin, Mary Sweeney; all the leaders from Bomber’s unit.
“They made you?” blurted Hawthorn. “Like a clone?”
A choked noise came from the doorway behind them. “No, not a clone! A new type of human being, improved by Hephaestus. You’ve never seen such perfect genes.”
Two guns and one wrathful telepath took aim at the bedraggled figure of Colonel Obrin, and silence fell onto them like snow.

***

A dizzying wave of blind hatred erupted from Bomber’s mind. He kept his barrel trained on Obrin’s throat the whole time, adjusting his angle with millimetric precision as the Colonel made his way into the room.
“Jacob,” he said, a hint of desperation in his voice, “there are a lot of things I did wrong. A lot of things I regret. There’s no way I can apologise or make up for some of it, but I want you to know, I never once regretted you. You and the other kids were a triumph. You came out better than expected in every way. Mentally, physically, everything. You can accept implants at a level way beyond what a normal human body could tolerate. What does it matter where you came from?”
He paused, as if expecting some kind of response to his speech, but Bomber didn’t say a thing. Obrin gave a helpless gesture and plunged onward.
“It’s true, we put fake childhood memories in your head to help you develop a normal emotional response. It was a lie, but you wouldn’t have wanted the truth. I’m sorry for it. Now ask yourself, what does it matter? You’re perfect as you are, more perfect than any of us.”
This time, Bomber sucked in a breath through his mouth, and started to speak.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t care if I grew out of a womb or a test tube. I don’t care if my memories ain’t real. But it seems to me you’re apologisin’ for the wrong thing, Colonel. You should’ve gone with the things I know are real.” Another shaky inhalation, as if the next few words made him so angry he could barely control himself. “I remember everything, Colonel. I remember this.” He threw the file at Obrin’s feet. “And I remember the way you turned on us and handed us over like a fuckin’ bargaining chip. You sold out your country… Helped the Feds nuke millions of people… To get your pet project back.”
“No, it wasn’t supposed to happen like that! I was trying to save lives. Yours, and others.”
“But you didn’t. You knew what was coming, and you never told anyone.”
He looked down in shame. “I… I only wanted…”
“When has what you wanted ever mattered, Colonel? All you’ve done is try to cover things up. I wasn’t supposed to survive, was I? You wanted me to die, and my memories with me, so I could be swept under the rug with everything else.”
“No, Jacob!” he objected, passionately. “You don’t get it. It was a trade. They just wanted your implants. The tech to make their own super-soldiers. The orders were to capture, not kill.”
An image flashed through Bomber’s mind, echoing into Gina with its power. She knew the man. It was Lieutenant Cornell, his UN blue helmet lying on the ground next to him, as a proto-Federation terrorist emptied an automatic weapon into his body.
Then other thoughts began to creep in at the sides, as everyone began to grasp the full implications of Obrin’s story. Bomber blurted, “So… So you’re telling me I’m the Goddamn grand-daddy of the Fed Constables?”
“In a sense. But I didn’t give them the most important thing.” The way Obrin’s lips curled up faintly, his pupils the size of pinpoints, made him look like an unhinged preacher. Burning with mad passion. “Hephaestus is the key, the one thing the Feds never got their hands on. Don’t you see? I lost it, but we can get it back! I know we can, we can stop Gabriel and the Feds and make things right ourselves!”
Bomber glanced at Gina, then back again. Every time he thought about her, he was reminded of feelings that weren’t anger, or hate, or a lust for vengeance. She didn’t need to say anything. He knew her words and her feelings without being told.
“I only got one question for you, Colonel,” Bomber said. “What’s my real name?”
The Colonel hesitated. At length, he choked out the words, “Obrin. Jacob Obrin.”
“That’s what I thought.”
The bullet went in Colonel Obrin’s forehead and out the back of his neck. His body collapsed on the ground a moment later, waiting to die, though the brain and any kind of spirit was already gone.
Gina shivered and turned away, trying to scrub that memory out of her brain. It didn’t matter how much Obrin deserved it. She would never get used to watching people die.
“Bomber,” she whispered, “he was your father.”
He shook his head and returned his pistol to its holster. “Havin’ someone donate his genes don’t make that man a father. I didn’t have parents. The only ones I remember never existed.”
“Still!”
She felt almost a hypocrite, saying that. A few minutes ago she’d been prepared to execute the Colonel herself.
“He had to pay for what he did,” Bomber said, his tone infuriatingly reasonable. “Might as well be here, might as well be now.”
Taking a deep breath, he made his way to her side and put his hands on her shoulders. Inside him was a seething mass of emotion, barely kept at bay by his iron will, but she also felt a note of relief. Catharsis at the closing of the long and horrible chapter entitled ‘Keith Obrin.’ Maybe that was a good thing.
She asked, “Is that the only reason why you came?”
“What do you think?” He smiled — a real, sincere curl of the lips, his eyes gleaming. “I figured you’d be here, tryin’ to make things right. Goal one is achieved. Goal two is to stick it to Gabriel if we possibly can.”
He took her hand and accompanied her out the door, past the silent body of Colonel Obrin. She forced her eyes up and pretended it wasn’t there.
He added, “I’ve got a trick or two up my sleeve. Gotta go down one more floor.”
Major Hawthorn followed them in stunned silence. He didn’t want to be left behind.

***

The bottom floor of the Hephaestus Project bunker was a mess. Much of it had been stripped out in an organised and mechanical way. Gina recognised some of the vacant spaces; they matched the shapes of the abandoned, rusting equipment left on the doorstep of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The stuff Obrin had used to bring about that technological atrocity.
This level of the complex was smaller than the upper floors. Much of the space had been given over to a primitive nanopress. There were doors leading into the guts of that great machine but, from the way they hung off their hinges and offered glimpses at the tangled electronics inside, not even the press had escaped the Obrin’s pillaging. Or his deliberate sabotage.
Bomber swept his eyes over the ruined laboratory where the Hephaestus Project had developed its first nanobots. It too was a ruin. Only one piece of technology remained untouched: the artificial, plastic womb where the babies were incubated. Once, it would’ve been filled with an analogue of amniotic fluid. Instead there was only dust and dried-up yellow gunk crusting the edges of the window.
Bomber went to it and placed his hand on the semi-opaque glass. His face twitched into a distant, hard-to-read expression.
“I wanted to ask him more,” he said softly. “Am I his clone, or just an engineered embryo? How old am I? How much of me is me, and how much did they program in?”
Gina touched his arm in sympathy. “You still don’t know?”
“Memories aren’t everything.” He shrugged. “But enough to lead me back here.”
“How did you know Gabriel would come?”
“‘Cause of who he is,” he explained. “He’s here out of sentiment. He wants to feel justified. Otherwise why does he bother grandstanding for you when pretty soon none of this will matter?”
“Unless he’s lying,” Gina pointed out.
“You know him better than any of us, Gina. Do you think he’s lying?”
She sighed and shook her head.
One of the tables sported a nanoscale microscope. Out of idle curiosity, she went in and looked through the eyepiece. It held the familiar dead husks of Hephaestus bots. An investigation which no one had ever bothered to clean up. She looked away from it, and hugged herself.
“He says there’s no way to stop what’s already done,” she paraphrased. “I don’t know if there’s any chance we can still change things.”
Bomber went to her, and slipped his broad arms around her waist. “There was a time I would’ve wanted to turn back time. I never had much of a life out here, and I hate the Federation as much as anybody, but… But you, Gina. Gabe and the Feds can go hang. I won’t give you up for anything if I can help it.”
She glanced over her shoulder, questions in her eyes. “How do you know about that? You weren’t there when he talked about turning back…” She stopped, suddenly, and turned in his arms. “Bomber, am I wearing a wire?”
“Would you be very mad at me if I said ‘yes’?” he asked sheepishly. “It’s only nanotech, you never would’ve noticed.”
Taking a deep breath, Gina marshaled her temper and decided to let it go. It didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, not compared to the semi-apocalypse marching towards them. But she still elbowed him in the ribs, because he deserved it.
She said, “You told me you had a trick up your sleeve. Show me.”
“Yes,” came another voice from the doorway. Eyes the colour of wildfire locked on Bomber, looking coldly furious. “Show her, Dusther. I’ve got to tell you, though, I don’t think she’s gonna like it very much.”
Gabriel stared daggers at Bomber, and Bomber returned them. Bomber inched his way to an air duct up some ways up the wall. He climbed onto a desk, pulled off the grate covering, and lifted a large container out of the duct. The swooping bird emblem of the Federation featured repeatedly on the casing.
It was a sphere of sleek, military-grade metal, deeply scarred and holed by somebody with high-powered tools and a grudge. From these holes dangled a crude jury-rig of wires, tubes and other homemade electronics. A small red light on top pulsed on and off.
“It’s an antimatter warhead,” Bomber explained. “Triggered by a dead-man switch coded to my brainwave patterns. If you change ’em, or they stop, or anyone tampers with the detonator… Boom. Matter-antimatter annihilation.”
Gabriel gave a mirthless chuckle. “I appreciate the thought, but it’s not much of a threat to a man who wants to die.”
“True. But I figure Hephaestus ain’t perfect. It can’t reconstitute what it doesn’t have, right?” Now it was Bomber’s turn to smile. “So you wouldn’t want Gina’s atoms to be blown out of existence, never to be resurrected in your brave new world.”
Horrified, Gina looked from Bomber to Gabriel and back again. She couldn’t decide if it was worse to die, truly die, or to go along with Gabriel’s nanorobotic regression. Then she started to get properly livid. As Bomber climbed down from the desk, she strode up to him and slapped him hard across the face.
“You got some fucking brass trying to pull that on me, Bomber,” she snapped as he touched his cheek and turned hurt eyes on her. It didn’t slow her down. She had never been so angry with him. “I am not your pawn to use in some fucked-up chess game!”
For a moment he sounded sullen. “What else was I supposed to do? You’re the only thing he cares about.”
Gabriel, despite enjoying the spectacle, snapped his fingers to get their attention. “First you’ll have to convince me you’d kill her that way,” he pointed out, “any more than I would. I don’t think you can.”
“Don’t you fucking start,” Gina hissed at him. “I’m not gonna let you talk about me like I’m not here, and I’m not gonna let you use me to bluff–“
She trailed off suddenly.
A wave of violent nausea rose out of nowhere, bubbling up inside, and hit her like a sledgehammer. All the blood drained from her face. She sank to her knees, hugging her stomach, groaning and dry-heaving over bare concrete. Both Bomber and Gabriel rushed to her side to hover with impotent worry.
“Gina, what’s wrong?” Bomber asked, halfway to panic by her condition. “Talk to me!”
She glanced at him, then at Gabriel. She couldn’t do it anymore. She was too afraid, too sick, and too tired to lie.
“I’m pregnant,” she sighed, at last.

A video recording played over and over on Rat’s screen. It was the last transmission from Tango Two, the Sichuan strike team. Blurry image of a nano-press, partly in ruins, its entire right side shredded by shrapnel. What remained of it leaned to one side, and only a small trickle of silver dripped from one of the nozzles. Just enough to be dangerous.
She’d muted the audio, but she could remember the voices all too well from her first viewing.
“Our objective was to take that thing intact and operational, Sergeant. We can at least use what’s left of it.”
“Sir, with all due respect, those… those things already took Hong!”
“I understand the danger. Everyone needs to hold position until we can figure out how–“
The rest of it was lost in squealing distortion. A few shots rang out through the static before the feed washed out completely. In all likelihood, those were their last moments, and Rat didn’t enjoy the thought.
Jules didn’t like it either. He said petulantly, “We should be following orders. Those men are counting on us.”
“That’s not what I need right now, pal,” she shot back. The Chrome Rat wasn’t here to be whined at. “You are just gonna have to trust me.”
She did not look out of the cockpit at the world, the City, spread out below her in a seemingly infinite urban sprawl. She paid no attention to the rows of glittering streetlamps, or the logos and advertisements in blazing neon and holographic light. She couldn’t care less about the ant-like motion of cars trundling up and down the motorways. They were all things she ignored fervently in an attempt to fool her brain into believing she was in a very noisy room somewhere low to the ground.
The only indication of reaching the City’s outskirts was a slight thinning and tapering, as the tops of the buildings gradually shrunk down out of the clouds and approached ground level. Patches of greenery poked out between the concrete. People here had gardens, and space to turn around in. Every now and again you could even find an empty plot, bereft of any development. Nobody had bothered to pave it over yet.
For a helicopter this fast, it was a relatively quick jaunt north from Shanghai, but Rat grudgingly admitted — on the inside, at least — that Jules had a point. If this was a wild goose chase they would lose precious time. Rat might’ve been able to hack into the building from the outside, shut down the nanopress, or something…
Still, this felt like the right call. She always did best when running on instinct. Her hunches and gut feelings saw her through many a tight spot. Something kept telling her that this was where she should be. She trusted Jock’s abilities as a hacker, but it wouldn’t be the first time it all blew up in his face.
“Don’t land too close,” she told the pilot. “Put us down a few blocks away, near a public VR terminal if you can manage it.”
The helicopter slipped out of the sky with all the quiet gentleness of a gliding leaf. It touched down in one of the empty lots, armoured rotors skimming the tops of a chain-link fence. Pieces of cut wire went everywhere. A few curious locals, hanging out of their windows to observe the landing, had to duck behind cover.
Rat wrestled out of her seatbelt, popped the canopy, and already had one foot out before the wheels even touched earth. She practically leaped the rest of the way, so anxious to be back on solid ground. Jules hurried after her.
“Pilot says he’ll circle the area and wait for our instructions,” he told her, as their feet left grass for pavement. She accepted the news without comment.
It was an ordinary street corner, a bit more spread-out than its brethren in the inner city but no significant variation on the theme. There was space to walk, space to drive, and neglected bus stops which served a route that hadn’t been driven in years. The only real landmark was what Rat had asked for; a garishly-coloured cube of four booths, a lifeline to GlobeNet for all the people who couldn’t afford their own hookup or didn’t have the space for it.
“You still haven’t told me what we’re gonna do,” Jules remarked.
Rat gave him a thin smile without breaking her stride. She opened one of the booths, and wrinkled her nose. It smelled like a used bathroom. She looked at the others and found they were worse.
She said, “We’re here in case everything else goes wrong.” Then, “And it will.”
She slid her credit card through the slot, grabbed the VR crown from the wall, and jacked in.

***

Public VR terminals had all sorts of blocks and security measures installed to keep people from abusing them, but those were meant to keep out the ordinary citizen or ignorant teenager. Rat was no virgin to this game. Every aspiring hacker started out on public rigs, and even this worthless off-the-shelf hardware could be coaxed into giving a little more than the designers would’ve wanted. With enough work you could almost make it useful.
First, she took a shortcut to the Stor-All on Main Street and called up her private folder, just for emergencies. From there she ran all the little programs which would give her full control of everything.
The rig gave an obedient beep. It was ready to serve her as its Queen.
First things first, she downloaded and put on her own custom avatar. She wouldn’t be caught dead wearing one of those off-the-shelf jobs. Looking cool was essential to your innate hacker-dom, and many took it as a point of pride to show an avatar which kind-of resembled you.
That took care of the fashion problem. Next she overrode the lock on international connections and manually entered the address of Cloud City’s super-secret open line. The next moment she was catapulted into a blank white room, with three avatars manoeuvring around a collection of blank white cubes. She recognised Jock, and Harmony, and Hideo, though they were nowhere near as detailed as before. All three looked at her in frank astonishment.
“Yo,” she said. “How are we doing?”
This caught Jock off-guard. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, and said, “We’re fine. You’re supposed to be on your way to Sichuan district.”
“Who says I’m not?”
“Never mind, not important.” He hurried back to the console — one white cube among many — and resumed working feverishly on something Rat couldn’t even see. Her rig refused to display it. She could force it to, of course, but it would probably kill itself trying to render that much detail. “We’re kinda busy here, Lex.”
She made her way to the next cube over and casually leaned back against it. Even in bad VR, she could see the way Jock tensed up at her nearness. That meant something hadn’t gone to plan. She knew him too well, and although being right meant bad news for everyone, she couldn’t help the warm glow of self-satisfaction in her chest.
She said, “That doesn’t sound ‘fine’ to me. Need any help?”
“We just have to figure something else out, is all. It’s under control. We’re handling it.”
“No,” interrupted Harmony, “we’re not.” The older woman stepped away from her console and threw up her hands in frustration. “We were ready to sail right through that opening, and it closed seconds before we made our move. It was anther ruse and we fell for it.”
Jock sputtered, “That doesn’t mean–“
“I’m afraid it does. We’re running out of time, Jock.” She let out a deep sigh. “Mr. Kagehisa, I intend to authorise the bombing run. Do you concur?”
After a long moment’s thought, Hideo said, “I do.”
A complicated gesture of Harmony’s hands summoned up a high-tech control panel. It looked like a slick piece of homemade software. She hooked directly into the Laputan military frequency and began to issue her orders.
“Echo flight, this is Laputa. I want payloads on target. Send them on and come home–“
The voice from the other side cut in before she could finish. The flight leader delivered his words with clipped, military urgency. “Contact! Multiple infrared signatures closing on our position. They’re almost on top of us! Computer ID, Federation Hyperion air-to-air missile.”
Everyone began to crowd around Harmony’s screen, which now showed the bombers’ radar results in real-time. Rat was no expert but it looked bad.
“Threat confirmed,” came the response from the Laputan command centre. The operator’s voice twanged with forced calm. “Detect eight missiles fired from four launch locations. Drop altitude and take evasive action.”
The flight leader obeyed without hesitation. One of his pilots, though, held position and broke into the radio circuit. “Negative, Echo One! There’s no way we can survive this. I am committing.”
The radar screen morphed into a camera feed from the plane’s bomb bay. It was a surprisingly empty space. It only contained one launcher, and in that launcher was a long, thin, strangely-finned missile.
The bay doors opened. Some more radio chatter, argumentative, but nobody was listening to it. Rocket engines flared to life. The missile trembled in its cradle for a moment and flashed away into the distance.
The video feed became a burst of white light. The radio chatter died. Echo flight was gone, but they got off one confirmed launch.
Jock couldn’t tear his eyes away from the dead camera, crestfallen. Harmony looked horrified. Hideo was harder to read, but the clenched fists by his side told Rat enough.
The missile launch was a triumph worth cheering, but at the same time a new awareness began to creep over her. It occurred to her where that missile was headed, and where she was in relation to it. Uncomfortably inside the envelope labelled ‘margin of error.’
There was no time to feel sorry for anyone.
“I gotta go,” she said, and punched the rig’s emergency shut-off.

***

The Lariat missile, pride and joy of the Marxist arsenal, had an operational range of eight hundred miles. More than enough. Its navigation package, too, was among the best in the world. Range-finding lasers lashed out in every direction several hundred times a second, reading the landscape to an almost manic level of accuracy. This let the missile skim the City’s rooftops barely two metres above concrete. Several times it rattled past the windows of an inconvenient starscraper, giving their residents a close-up view of six metres of rocket-propelled menace. Then the sonic boom blew out the glass and knocked everybody to the ground.
At certain points along the Lariat’s flight path, anti-missile defences awoke from their slumber and swivelled to search for a clear shot. Ultraviolet laser beams stabbed invisibly through the night to intercept, and failed to connect.
The missile bobbed and weaved and swam through the air like a living thing. It detected enemy lock-on and used the buildings around it as cover. One by one, it left the defence cannons behind, and they stood down.
They were out of range. Nothing could stand between the Lariat and its programmed target.
Meanwhile, Rat stumbled out of the VR booth, catching Jules by the arm. He allowed himself to be led. By now he was well past the point of protesting anything she did, and learned to respect her survival instincts.
All he asked was, “Why?”
“Cruise missile,” breathed Rat.
“Ah.”
At Jules’s suggestion, they searched for an underground space, somewhere to protect them from the blast. Rat insisted they had to be able to see the impact. They compromised on a metro station a few blocks away from Gabriel’s address. They huddled together in the stairwell, fearfully watching the sky, wondering if their pilot was still up there somewhere.
“This is the last time I try to outsmart a computer,” she said sourly, and braced herself.
It happened in a fraction of a second. No warning, no sign of impending doom. A momentary streak of light across the sky, barely more than a firework. Then…
Sonic boom and explosion merged into one earth-shattering sound. The ground shook. Chunks of tile and plaster fell from the ceiling. Lights flickered. For a few seconds the whole block was plunged into darkness, but a lively orange glow started up around the corner. Something was on fire.
Rat unclenched her fingers one at a time. After a while she had almost let go of Jules. She was still shaking off the pulse-pounding fear when he made his way up top and whooped in triumph.
“Direct hit,” he cheered. He turned to her and threw his arms wide. “We’re still alive!”
She gave a hesitant nod. Was this the end of it? Had they won?Of course not, said her trained, professional pessimism. Not yet, not until they made sure the Sword was really dead.
The Chrome Rat emerged back onto the street and began to walk toward the devastation.
Broken glass crunched under her shoes. The streets were covered in wreckage, scattered brick and concrete, patches of still-burning jet fuel. People stood in doorways and on balconies, worried. The streetlights around the impact area had gone out, and a few of the buildings were without power.
Rat continued to the large, walled villa at the end of the road. Only a small section remained. The rest was gravel and ash and half-melted stone. A few scorched bushes crumbled into powder as she pushed her way through.
The intact portion consisted of a small circle around the villa’s fireplace, now choked with debris from the collapsed chimney. Everything had been peppered and scored by shrapnel. A piece of abstract metalwork still hung over the mantle, but from the way it drooped, it probably used to look prettier than it did now.
Not ten metres away, a deep crater curved into the ground where the missile had struck. A few pieces of twisted metal were left, nothing more.
At first glance, it just looked like somebody’s house, no secret doors or tricks up its sleeve. A cold nugget of doubt built up in Rat’s gut, wondering if they’d hit the right building, but she quashed it. No point second-guessing. This was the address, so this was the place.
Then she noticed a metal gleam from the corner of her eye, firelight reflecting on something in the floor by the fireplace. She dropped to one knee and dug at the rubble. Jules, searching on his own, rushed in to help.
There, tucked away under what used to be a rug, she found a heavy trap-door leading to the cellar. The impact had warped and dented it almost beyond recognition. The concrete around it was gouged and scarred. The edges had fused to the frame, welding the whole thing shut, and no amount of pushing or pulling would get it unstuck.
“Leverage,” said Jules. He found a heavy piece of rebar, wedged it into a crack, and together they gave it everything they had.
Metal ripped and tore. It let out a loud, protesting screech,but it finally gave way with a sudden pop. They hefted it aside and looked down. It was deep, very deep, and she could swear she saw a light burning small and steady somewhere below.
She smiled at Corporal Kelso and asked, “You ready to be a hero?”
“We’ll find out,” he said and, grabbing the ladder, volunteered himself to go first.

***

It was another awful test for Rat’s fear of heights. She managed to go down rung after rung, keeping a firm grip on herself, until she was halfway along and the floor came into view far below. She clamped on to the rungs in a pounding rush of panic, and couldn’t budge herself until Jules gave her a sedative from his suit supply. It was strong stuff. After a few seconds she stopped being afraid of anything.
“Keep an eye on your breathing,” Jules said, concern in his voice. “These can be very bad for you if you aren’t trained.”
Rat nodded and resumed her climb. Her feet hit bottom without ceremony. She inspected the cellar, then breathed a long sigh of satisfaction.
For once, maybe for the first time in this grudge match with Gabriel, they’d been right. She was looking at the Angel’s Sword.
Vast banks of processors stood in lines on the other side of a glass wall. Temperature readouts on each box blinked rapidly as they checked and re-checked the conditions inside the server room. Wisps of super-cooled steam curled along the bottoms of the smooth, black monoliths, giving no hint of the power that pulsed beneath their carbon-nanotube shell.
The ceiling had sagged inward, and Rat counted a few shallow marks and fissures from the missile strike. Even the foot-thick glass was cracked and frosting over with condensation. A small fuse box in the corner shot out random showers of sparks, making the lights dim each time. Everything else kept running as though nothing had happened.
A direct hit by a warhead designed to crunch military bunkers, and it came away bruised but functioning. This place could certainly take a punch.
“So this is what an AI looks like,” Jules whispered.
Rat nodded and understood his awe. Those processing towers exuded a palpable aura of menace, all wreathed in white smoke. The Sword was in there, and she knew what it was capable of. Any second now she expected its voice to pour out of some hidden speaker, lecturing and carrying on in its usual tone of smug self-satisfaction.
“I gotta hand it to you, Ma’am,” said Julian, “you were right on the money. We have a strike team on the way but I don’t know how long they’ll be. If the Feds haven’t already stopped them.”
“We should hurry.”
She crossed to a large metal door covered in yellow-black warning stickers. Pushing it open, she encountered the beating, mechanical heart of the whole operation.
It was a deceptively small room. Along the west wall, a heat-exchanger fed liquid helium into dozens of thick pipes and conduits. A recess in the east wall contained a bank of controls that had gone askew from the impact. Damaged wiring bled out from behind and underneath the heavy metal casing.
In the centre, a white metallic pyramid stretched from floor to ceiling, covered in complicated holographic screens and yet more warning stickers. Rat recognised the one with the yellow background, black trefoil leaves going down and to the sides. It blew all the artificial cool out of her system in one fell swoop.
She was standing within eight feet of an operational nuclear reactor.
She looked at Jules. He looked back at her.
“I guess that puts high-explosives out of the question.” Jules’s tone was dry as old bone. “No wonder he built this place like a fortress.”
By an effort of will, Rat tried to dislodge all the horrible what-ifs from her brain. She could’ve been in the danger zone of a nuclear meltdown. If that missile had gone a little deeper, or struck in a more sensitive spot…
“Do you know how to shut it down?” she asked, though she almost didn’t want to hear the answer.
“Oh, sure, I do this kind of thing all the time.”
“Sarcasm, right?”
“Just a tiny bit.” He grinned to ease the tension. “Can we get into the server room instead?”
Rat shook her head. This time, she was all business. “I’m sure that suit of yours is very fancy, but the cold in there can kill a person in less than ten seconds. I’d turn off the cooling but the controls are over there.” She gestured at the damaged panel, well beyond their ability to fix without parts.
“Let me call Headquarters. There’s gotta be someone on staff who can walk us through.”
Jules took Rat’s phone and dialled, while up on the surface, an emergency siren began to sound the impending arrival of the Federal Police.

***

It took a minute to get through to the command centre in Laputa, and another to make them understand the situation. The call bounced up the chain of command faster and faster until Jules had to hand the phone back, and Rat found herself back on conference with her friends in high places. Jules, wound up tight by the incessant siren wail, went to secure the entrance. Anything to buy them a few more seconds from the Feds.
“Alex-han,” came Hideo’s voice, “I won’t waste time asking you what you’re doing there. Suffice it to say, your disobeying orders might be the best thing that happened to us all day.”
“Good,” she shot back. She wasn’t in the mood to justify herself to anybody, especially dear, sweet Kensei. “Did they brief you?”
“They briefed all of us,” Jock cut in. He sounded like a whole barrel of sour grapes, but he did his best to rise above it. “Hideo’s not kidding, Lex. We’re still trying but it looks like you are our best bet.”
Back to Kensei. “We received the recordings from your telephone. That reactor is a very secure set-up. It would present a challenge for a fully-equipped tech team.”
Trying to keep on top of her stress, Rat pinched the bridge of her nose and paced in a circle around the room, keeping to the outer edge, away from the reactor. “You’re warming me up for something I don’t wanna hear.”
“Alex.” Harmony, this time. The whole gang really was there. “How… How do you feel about the phrase ‘controlled nuclear detonation’?”
Things went very quiet for a minute. Nobody could believe their ears, even Harmony. The thought of it made her sick, putting hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians in danger.
When Rat still didn’t respond, Harmony started again, “I’m sending you an image. Tell me what this looks like to you.”
Overcome by morbid curiosity, Rat held out the phone in front of her and summoned up the tiny screen. Whatever she was expecting, what she saw didn’t match it. It didn’t make any sense until it zoomed out far enough to make out landmarks, the shapes of buildings, seen from the top down. It was a satellite photo of some kind. But it didn’t make any sense.
At first it was a simple, featureless plain, flat as a pancake and just as uninteresting. A pervasive sense of wrongness grew in Rat’s hindbrain as the image continued to zoom out to reveal the ‘plain’ was more than a mile across, smack in the middle of Sichuan district. It sat right where downtown used to be. Even more interesting, the edges of it rippled slightly, so it looked like the circle was expanding to swallow more and more.
A second image flashed into being beside it, and this time she recognised it right away. Another, much bigger circle was eating out the pulsing heart of Shanghai. Then another, in what looked like Bangladesh. One of Gabriel’s other nanofactory sites. The strike teams had left it alone because it was just too far out of the way.
“What in all that’s holy?” she whispered. She saw but she didn’t understand. The mind couldn’t comprehend that the land and everything on it had been reduced, recycled, into their base molecules and prepared to be used again.
Little sparks and flashes showed at the edges where the cloud came into contact with Federal nanoscreens. The cloud always won, overwhelmed them by sheer weight of numbers. Dozens of planes and helicopters were in the air, circling and observing. One of them backed away to fire a missile into the cloud. It was gone, disassembled, before it reached ten metres in.
“Whatever’s going on, I don’t think we triggered it,” Jock tried to explain. “Maybe just moved up the schedule a little. We’re not sure how much these clouds rely on the AI, but it’s got to be doing at least some of the thinking for them. We need to finish Sword off or we don’t stand a chance.”
A second rocket detonated right at the edge of the cloud. The explosion proceeded normally in every direction except forward, where it looked for all the world like it met a strong headwind. All those hot, fast-moving atoms were converted like every other piece of matter in front of the ever-expanding cloud.
“I think I’m about to get an angry call from the Federal ambassador,” said Harmony. It was almost a sigh. “Maybe even High Command. You can bet your ass they won’t hesitate about nuclear detonations, and they won’t worry too much about controlling them.”
“There is a chance, if we hit hard from all sides, the clouds will run out of raw materials before they become self-sustaining,” Jock added, though he didn’t sound too confident. “There are a lot of rare metals involved.”
“We can hope.” Harmony smiled. She didn’t believe it either.
Rat cleared her throat. It took several attempts to dislodge the thick lump that kept her from speaking. “What if I can’t stop this? What if it’s already too late?”
“I wish I knew, Alex. All that matters right now is that we’ve got exactly two chances. Gina’s been out of contact for almost two days. The other one is you.”
A soft electronic chime told Harmony she had another call. She dropped out of the circuit, leaving Rat with Hideo and Jock.
“We’re sending some more data,” said Hideo. “Interactive manuals and references. It should help you disengage the safeties and set up a partial core melt in that reactor.”
“Hey, I didn’t agree to anything yet!” She paced back and forth, panicking at the thought, and let the fear make her angry. “What about all the people living here? What are they gonna do?”
“What about all the people who will be turned into slurry by those clouds if we don’t find a way to stop them?”
She bit her lip and looked down at her toes. She didn’t have a good answer to that.
“Hey, Hideo,” she whispered.
“Hmm?”
“Ever wish you were still playing for the other team?”
“Alex-han,” he replied, “I would be a God-damned idiot if I still thought Gabriel’s goals were compatible with mine.”
The sudden roar of dropship engines made Rat jerk in surprise. Her heart skipped a couple of beats, and her mind filled with memories of her stay as a guest at FedPol headquarters in Hong Kong. Not an experience she cared to repeat.
“We don’t have much time.” Hideo sounded distracted, as if doing several other things at once. “Jock and Corporal Kelso can help talk you through it. Good luck.”
Rat winced. Never before had that phrase been more inadequate for the job at hand.

“What do you mean, ‘detour?'” asked Gina, shaking off her grogginess. She divided her attention between Henry and the heavy black-and-yellow thunderclouds on the horizon, brooding, pregnant with evil. It was the biggest dust storm she’d ever seen. Swirls of old fallout whirled at the edges while polluted lightning flashed orange and green in its murky depths. It hung there like a big radioactive wall placed squarely between them and Fredericksburg.
The driver concentrated on crawling down the hill of dry, cracked ground in front of him. The Land Rover swayed from side to side as the rubble slid around under its monstrous tires but it never lost its poise. “I mean I can drive this truck through that storm, Ma’am, but you don’t want me to do that. Not if you fancy the idea of coming back from this trip.”
From the back seats, Major Hawthorn leaned in and asked, “How long are we talking here?”
“Depending on wind factors, I’d say eight to twelve hours. Maybe more.”
“We don’t have eight to twelve hours to fuck around,” Gina pointed out. “The fate of the world could depend on us.”
Boy, did that feel weird coming out of her mouth. The planet ought to have better saviours than Gina Hart and Andrew Hawthorn.
“I’m telling you, our dust filters aren’t gonna last. What the Hell else do you want us to do?”
“Push through,” she replied in a voice like iron.
“Push through?” Henry slammed his foot on the brakes, bringing the Land Rover to a juddering halt. He looked over his shoulder, jaw set and eyes ablaze. “Listen, girlie, I didn’t sign up for a suicide mission. I’ve got a wife and kids at home!”
There was a soft click. The muzzle of Hawthorn’s pistol pressed gently against Henry’s temple. “I thought I told you that whatever the lady says, goes.” The Major’s rippling thoughts were religious in their intensity. The power of it hit Gina like a punch in the chest, but she tried not to let it show.
A second of desperate tension ticked away. Suddenly, Henry moved, trying to dodge and grab the gun in the same movement. A full complement of cutting-edge soldier boosts made his reactions as fast as a bullet — as fast as Bomber, if not more. To Gina’s eyes he was a blur of explosive energy. A knife appeared in his other hand, and he twisted around to drive it deep into Hawthorn’s side.
The seatbelt clicked and snapped taut, cutting his movement short. He didn’t have the reach. He wasn’t fast enough. Maybe he was never going to be.
Neither was Gina. She tried to reach out, tried to stop Hawthorn, but she didn’t have time. A bang tore into her eardrums, louder than the world exploding, accompanied by the crack of punctured glass. Air whistled in through a hole in the driver-side window. The whole door was painted red and grey with what used to be their driver.
“Fuck,” she groaned, and wiped a sleeve across her face to scrub away the spatters of blood.
A few minutes later, Major Hawthorn had wrestled the body into the back and was doing his best to clean up. An emergency slap-on patch plugged the hole in the window. Gina forced her nerves to calm. It was nothing she hadn’t seen before. The Major was probably right in deeming it necessary. Better to just move on.
Hawthorn said to the back of her head, “I’ve been watching his movements. I can drive this thing.”
She slowly shook off the nasty after-images of Henry’s disposal, and gave the Major a long look. He was ready to get her to her destination at any cost. Not just for the sake of the mission, but because it was what she wanted. His feelings were a strange mix of awe, fear and love.
She coughed to clear her throat. “Is it true what he said?”
“Hey. I always figured this would be a one-way trip.”
She nodded and let him take the wheel.
They drove into the storm, and it engulfed them. They were invisible but blind. For a while Gina wondered if Gabriel could sense her coming, or if he was too busy with Colonel Obrin and his search. The piece of him inside her had been dormant for days now, as though all his attention were focussed elsewhere. To be fair, she’d be preoccupied too if she were about to complete her life’s work. He didn’t even know he was going to be a father, yet.
God. She wasn’t looking forward to that part.
Their time of arrival blinked red on the navigation screen. Three more hours. She thought about casting herself adrift again, to try to find Rat or Bomber, but she couldn’t bear the idea of not being here when they arrived. So she hunkered down and watched the time slip away minute by minute, butterflies in her stomach, wondering what she should expect.
She deliberately ignored Henry lying in state in the back, especially when Major Hawthorn stuffed the body into the airlock and flushed him out.

***

Every time Gina didn’t think the storm could get any worse, it would prove her wrong. Heavy shutters dropped over all the windows to protect them from getting scratched or cracked by flying debris. They were driving by instruments only, pretty much blind and inching forward at a crawl. The exterior cameras showed an endless maelstrom of brown dust. Gina couldn’t look at it for long before she started to see ghosts, vaporised by nuclear fire or succumbing to the slow agony of radiation poisoning. Statues of ash that crumbled in the breeze.
She shivered. It was lonely out here.
The silence inside the Land Rover felt oppressive, but neither Gina nor Hawthorn felt inclined to break it. The machine’s endless mechanical noises didn’t help at all — gravel grinding under the tires, the clunk of the industrial gearbox, suspension springs creaking and groaning under the strain. The only other sound was the soft chattering of Gina’s teeth.
She kept fighting off the shaky panic attacks which had plagued her in New Orleans. It took all her concentration to stay on top of herself. She had much more control over things now, but in many ways she still had a long way to go. She barely knew how to use most of her talents, let alone understand them. She wished it came as easy to her as it did Gabriel. A lot of good people would still be alive. A few bad ones, too, but they didn’t deserve to die.
Even with all this power, she couldn’t win every battle. She couldn’t seem to make the world into what she wanted it to be.
The navigation computer beeped. It announced their arrival at the designated coordinates, and automatically loaded an old map of Fredericksburg from before it was nuked. It helpfully highlighted several natural landmarks in the area. It failed to take into account that they were all invisible through the storm, if the bomb hadn’t already knocked them down.
“They’re here,” Gina said. There was no doubting the identity of those minds, only a few kilometres away. Gabriel and Colonel Obrin were somewhere in this storm. She took the wheel from Hawthorn, pointed them in the right direction, and stepped on the accelerator to send their giant vehicle barrelling down on the target. The smooth ground allowed them to build up some speed for a change, the old sand melted into glass.
Suddenly the Land Rover emerged into a patch of calm, like the eye of the storm, a narrow column of ground where the swirling dust just didn’t go. The exterior cameras cleared up and the shutters raised as the computer judged it safe.
The front windscreen offered a perfect view of two men surrounded by heavy machinery of all shapes and sizes. Robotic arms on wheels, strange blocky containers, control consoles, power generators and floodlights. Even a few abandoned cars, mirror-painted against radiation, sitting on their wheels or lying on their sides. Faded warning stickers in yellow and black adorned pretty much everything. It was unmistakably a worksite of some kind. Gina couldn’t even begin to guess what it was for, but the whole set-up exuded a sense of impending danger, in the way that only untested military prototypes could.
It wasn’t new, though. Rust stained much of the equipment. It was all holed, rotted and battered down by years of wind and weather. By the look of it, the site had been abandoned in a hurry, a long time ago.
Gina looked at the Geiger counter. The radiation outside was barely stronger than sunlight. She looked over her shoulder at the radiation suits, then at Gabriel caught in the Land Rover’s headlights, and threw caution to the wind. She kicked the door open and went outside.
Colonel Obrin stood at one of the control consoles, the only piece of equipment on site that was fresh and shiny, his hands frozen above the keyboard. He looked thinner than she remembered, his head shaved, but she still recognised him without hair or moustache. His face and his mind were locked in sheer confusion.
Behind him, Gabriel stood to one side. His coppery hair shone in the half-light. His eyes were bright and sharp, but slightly unfocussed, as if doing several things at the same time.
“You made it,” he said.
That didn’t seem like an appropriate thing to say to Gina, but she let it go. She approached slowly, step by step. “Whatever you’re doing, you need to stop it.”
“It’s already been set in motion. There’s no turning back now.”
“I am not in the mood for your cryptic bullshit today!” she lashed out, surprising herself and everybody around her. Now that she had the momentum, though, she wanted to keep it going. She tapped into her anger, her frustration, all the negative emotions she’d been carrying around for the last month, and hurled them at him like knives, one after another. “I’m tired of running. I’m tired of you evading my questions. I’m tired of this constant fucking chase scene! Read my lips, or my mind if you want to. One way or another, it ends today.”
He sighed. Tired. So tired. “You might not like what you hear, Gina.”
“I’m a big girl, Gabriel.”
“Fine,” he whispered, barely audible over the faint keening of the storm around them. “Mr. Obrin. If you please.”
The Colonel came back to life with a shock. He tapped one of the keys under his fingers. A loud, sharp hissing noise and a shower of hot sparks erupted from one of the cars. It had been rigged as a launching platform. A small rocket fizzed up into the air, above the storm, and exploded. Its shockwave flattened the dust like a heavy blanket thrown over the sky. Gina could feel it weighing down on her for a moment, blowing more dust into her eyes and hair, and then it was gone.
At last — for the first time in fourteen years — the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia was revealed for all to see.

***

On top of the barren, lifeless soil of ground zero, where not even grass was ready to return, stood a city. It was a fully-evolved metropolis, beyond modern. Towers of steel and mirrored glass stood in rows as far as the eye could see, arranged in a perfect grid. Every building had the sleek, efficient look of something designed by a machine. Between the skyscrapers were streets, of a sort. Strips of perfectly flat ground made from some glossy, silvery material which shimmered as you watched.
Gina had to shield her eyes, and even then it was hard to look at this strange city. Every surface seemed to emit light, blazing bright, enough to turn the night to day for miles around.
“God,” whispered Gabriel. “It’s really here. It’s just like I imagined.”
Hawthorn gawked in open-mouthed astonishment. “It’s not possible.”
“You’re looking at it, Major,” Gina told him. “Whatever it is.”
“We should be looking at six hundred kilotons of crater. This. . .” Words failed him. He turned to Gabriel, demanding, “What did you do?”
A mirthless grin split Gabriel’s face. “I’m afraid you can’t pin this one on me. The actual culprit is right here.”
He showed what he meant by giving Colonel Obrin an amiable pat on the shoulder. The Colonel didn’t respond. He was transfixed, staring into the middle distance with a haunted look on his face.
The longer Gina looked at the city, the more something got on her nerves about it. She couldn’t quite figure out what. It did look machine-made — Hell, it bore more than a passing resemblance to certain parts of Laputa — but it was more than that. Something in the way the buildings curved, or the way they swayed in the wind, or. . .
She saw it. “It’s changing,” she whispered.
Even as she watched, several of the towers altered their shape in subtle ways, following the aimless gusts of wind left over from the storm. Much like the streets, their surface shimmered and rippled in a way that made Gina’s skin crawl.
“There is something very wrong with that place.”
She looked over her shoulder, to where Hawthorn had Obrin by the lapels and was shaking him back and forth. The Major was shouting, “It’s because of Hephaestus, isn’t it? Did you let it loose here? Tell me the truth, right now!”
Obrin seemed to snap back to reality. Moisture brimmed in his eyes. “I tried to fix it.” His voice came out choked and broken. “I tried to put it back the way it was.”
And in that moment, Gina saw the truth. The memories came pouring into his mind and reverberated out from him like the note of a tuning fork, too clear and powerful to ignore.
Fourteen years ago, he had stood in this exact spot, looking down over the city. Around him were the loyal men and women of the Hephaestus project. They wore bright yellow radiation suits. Fallout blotted the sky, and somewhere nearby he could hear the mournful cries of an animal in the final stages of radiation poisoning. One more thing to weigh on his conscience. But if he could do something here, if he could bring this wasted city back to life, that would be some kind of redemption. Something good would’ve come from all this.
The equipment had been right where he left it, buried in a forgotten storage bunker at Quantico. His contacts in the new government had loaned him some vehicles and all the money he needed to show the potential applications of Hephaestus in the field. With the right dataset, the bots could collectively analyse any object and repair it, even something as complex as a human body. His work with the troops had proved that much. Not only repair, but enhance. The special heuristics program pioneered by Obrin’s team allowed the bots to learn how to make improvements to anything they could recognise. Even themselves, when instructed.
Their value to science and medicine alone would be staggering, but for that, he would need backing. He would need investors. So, he had to give them a showpiece. He had to give them Fredericksburg.
Three cars came crawling back up the hill and took turns going through the mobile disinfection unit. Down below, three blue barrels had been positioned at key points around the crater. Everything was ready and in position.
At a command from Obrin, billions of productive little robots went out into the world, equipped with orders to rebuild the city of New Fredericksburg. They analysed everything that remained. Learning, teaching themselves about what had stood here before, what a new population would need. Offices, living spaces, shops, recreation, utilities, public transport. All the comforts of modern living. And once they were sure they understood, they set to work creating something which ticked all the boxes in the most efficient way possible.
The onlookers oohed and ahhed as objects began to rise from the pool of silver putty. Bit by bit, the blasted wasteland transformed back to its former glory. More than its former glory. New, shiny, bigger and better than it had ever been.
And somewhere, buried deep in the blackened earth, Hephaestus found a single living cell.

***

Working backwards from DNA was a challenge even for Hephaestus, but with a plentiful supply of carbon at hand, it had everything it really needed. It began to decipher the vast amounts of information stored in that double helix of organic code. It crafted nucleotides and stuck them one on top of the other. It built another human cell, and delicately fitted it against the first.
It learned more as it went, and this tied into what it already knew from its previous work on the human body. It spun out muscles, adipose tissue, and bone. A skeleton. Organs. Limbs and a head. A brain.
And wherever it went, it made things better. Faster and stronger and more resilient. More functional, within the parametres of still being essentially human. This was what made Hephaestus such a triumph. It understood the purpose of the object rather than trying to alter it beyond all recognition.
So, then, the human brain. Elegant in its structure. Endless in its capabilities. Possibly the ultimate organ ever created in nature, so powerful that most computers of the age still couldn’t match the full reasoning of an average human. If only so much of that power wasn’t wasted in muddy repetition, faulty storage and insufficient cross-linking. Hephaestus could do better.
Eyes the colour of wildfire came open. A new-born human jerked up into a sitting position. He looked up at the skeletal city looming over him, rising slowly to blot out the sky. And he screamed.
The panic in Colonel Obrin’s encampment was total. The howl could be heard, thought and felt for miles around. Men and women fell to their knees, clapping hands to the sides of their helmets out of primitive instinct, as if that could drown out the sound.
“Turn it off!” someone called over the radio, and those who were still sane enough to press buttons fumbled for their controls. An answering voice came in shock, “Telemetry’s changing too fast. It won’t respond. It won’t obey the abort.”
A man came running towards them from the middle of the Fredericksburg reconstruction zone, naked except for the film of nanobots crawling over his skin. He lashed out blindly with the power of his mind. Cars overturned. Metal buckled under its force. Some of the team were hurled off their feet, ripping their radiation suits against the barren ground. Others simply died where they stood.
In the chaos, Obrin looked at his handler, the government operative assigned to evaluate the work. One moment the man was grabbing Obrin by the front of his suit, shouting words that no one else could hear, his radio forgotten. The next he toppled over backwards with his limbs in the air like a dead spider. With him went any hope of reviving the Hephaestus project. There would be questions asked, and repercussions. The new government, the Federation, was not forgiving.
The nameless man stopped on a hill-top, panting heavily, as if the first of his senses returned to him. He looked down at the silver putty sliding over his skin and reacted with another explosion of primal fear. He wiped and tore and tried to get as much of it off him as he could. Colonel Obrin watched as the robots simply merged into his skin. In a wild panic, the man sliced two great chunks of stone out of the landscape, and slipped back into the mindless urge to escape. He fled down the hill, out of sight.
Obrin glanced over what remained of his team. Most of them were wounded, contaminated, or both. Without intact suits they would never make it back to civilisation alive. Nor could they all fit into the single undamaged car.
Below them, Fredericksburg continued to rise, but that no longer mattered.
Unlike his team of scientists, Colonel Obrin was a soldier, and he made a very simple calculation. He had to protect himself. He had to contain this catastrophe and the best way of doing that was to make sure nobody found out about it.
What was left of his conscience twinged, but a few more deaths laid at his door wouldn’t make a difference. Not now. As long as he was alive and free, there was the chance he could rebuild.
He walked to the remaining car, got into the driver’s seat, and set off into the wilderness of Radiation Alley.

***

“Oh God,” moaned Gina, swaying, holding her head. The rush of memories tailed off. Her eyes searched for Colonel Obrin and found him on his knees, his face buried in his hands.
Her fingers curled, pressing the nails into her palms so hard she drew blood. She wanted nothing more than to pummel him to within an inch of his life. “You– You evil little man!”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” was all he said.
“Don’t tell me you managed to hide this for fourteen years,” Gina hissed. “What about patrols? Flyovers? Fucking satellite imaging!”
Gabriel made a sound halfway between a chuckle and a cough. “Have you looked up lately, Gina? Seen any satellites? Flyovers? Patrols?” He mimed an airplane flying through the sky with one hand, and his other wrapped around it like a blinding storm. “Half an hour from now the dust will be right back where it was, twice as thick. Nobody’s come here since this idiot let Hephaestus loose on the world. I couldn’t have found it without somebody who knew where it was.”
Staring out over the city, its buildings crawling as if alive, Gina still couldn’t make sense of it. “But why has Obrin been searching all this time, knowing Hephaestus was right here?”
“I don’t think you could call these ‘Hephaestus’ anymore. Like the ones in my body, they’ve been through hundreds, maybe thousands of generations, improving themselves each time. Becoming something else. I’d be surprised if the current generation remembers more than a shred of their original programming.” There was a sad smile on his lips as he added, “You see, he didn’t just release the bots. He cut corners. He had to make them tougher to survive in Radiation Alley. He had to improve something which was built to improve.”
In the background, Major Hawthorn made a strangled noise. “But the Laws of Nanorobotics–“
“Do not self-preserve,” quoted Gabriel. “Do not self-modify. Do not self-reproduce. Obrin broke them all.” He gestured to the end result, the gleaming city of Fredericksburg. “Once he took the limiters off, once they started evolving, there was no turning back.”
Gina turned, and studied Gabriel from a fresh perspective. His hands hung at his sides now, clenched into fists. His entire body was taut like a bowstring. For the first time, she got a sense of the emotions he was holding back by force of will alone.
“Kind of a crap place to be born, don’t you think?” he said with a slightly manic giggle.
“Gabriel…”
“For a while I thought that if I could make more telepaths, it would help me understand myself. It didn’t. This is what I really needed. To figure out where I came from. To know for sure.” He grabbed Obrin by his collar, dragging the unresisting colonel to his feet. “To meet the man who created me.”
Hawthorn stepped forward, one hand on his gun. “Let him go.”
“We’ve already played that game, Major. Do we really need to play it again?”
“I may not be able to keep you down, but I can hurt you.”
“Truth. However, I can most certainly kill you.”
“Stop it, the both of you!” Interposing herself between them, Gina stood her ground. “Nobody’s gonna hurt anybody. We’re here to talk.”
Gabriel smiled at her, saying, “I’m afraid there’s not much more to talk about. This is the endgame. As we speak, my Sword should be finishing off your friends in the City, and the preparations are just about done.” He gave Obrin a little shake. The man hung in his grip like a rag-doll. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Gina, but you wouldn’t be here if there were even the slightest chance you could affect the outcome.”
“What have you done, Gabriel?” she hissed, not sure she wanted to know the answer.
“To put it simply…” he hesitated, “No, to put it really simply, I want to turn back time.” He seemed to think of something funny, and gave the tiniest, bleakest chuckle in the history of laughter. “Turns out your friend Jacob and I have the same goal. I should never have been alive.”
The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, but she fought it down and forced nonchalance into her voice. “Seems a little elaborate for a suicide.”
“It’s not so easy when you’re full of robots who insist on repairing you, over, and over, and over…” He closed his eyes as if to block out some unpleasant memories. “Suicide isn’t enough. If anything of me remains, even a single cell, I might get rebuilt again. That can’t happen.”
Taking in a deep breath, Gabriel prepared to explain.

***

“Meet Colonel Keith Obrin, United States Marines, DARPA, Special Operations Command, Army Aviation Branch, and a few other services besides. Former commanding officer of Project Hephaestus, a military nanotech program tasked with creating a new kind of super-soldier, boosted far beyond any other unit of the era. When his bosses decided to cut Hephaestus from the books, it was just too much for poor Keith. He decided to go rogue. He stopped serving his country and started serving himself.
“For the last fifteen years, this man has been at the root of everything. The nukes. The Federation. Jacob Dusther, Fredericksburg, me, you. I would never even have met you, Gina, if it weren’t for him giving the order to spy on me. For fifteen years he’s been chasing a pipe dream, a past that’s never coming back. At least not the way he wanted it.”
Gabriel gave a cool smile at his own turn of phrase. He looked from Gina, to Hawthorn, to Obrin, and back again. His thoughts rippled out without any attempt to hide them, calm and clear as a reflecting pool.
“The world has been paying for Keith Obrin’s foolishness long enough. I’m planning to reverse his mistakes. All of them.”
“What are you saying?” asked Gina, her eyebrows knitted into a frown, not understanding. A cold, crawling feeling marched up her spine. Whether she could make sense of Gabriel’s statement or not, she got the distinct impression that it wasn’t just born of insanity or pride. “You can’t reverse time. There’s no way.”
“There is one way, if you’re me. Remember, I’m smarter than the average bear.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” He sighed. “The simple explanation is that I’m not going to manipulate time at all. “
He crossed to his car and lifted the heavy tarpaulin off the back. Underneath, strapped down to the bed, was a canister. A nanocontainer of immense proportions. Readouts burned a steady green on its little status display. All was well, at least with the bots inside.
Gabriel went on, “I invented a derivative of Hephaestus that doesn’t repair so much as restore. It can analyse the location and state of things as they were many years in the past. Then I created a snapshot of the world from fifteen years ago, assembled out of every scrap of data GlobeNet has to offer. Medical records, education, employment, everything from damn near every computer built or operated in the last two decades.”
A little light went on in Hawthorn’s brain. “Your botnet virus. It’s not just there to shut things down, is it? It’s there to learn. To spy on people.”
“In a sense, yes. And I needed an AI to help me collate all those thousands of terabytes into a useful set of operations. Sword is managing the whole procedure from my home in the City. Does that put all the puzzle pieces together for you?” The interruption annoyed Gabriel, but he soon recaptured his serene smile. Nothing could keep him down for long in his moment of triumph. “I’m going to put things back the way they were before I was even conceived. Everyone can start over from a clean slate. No Spice, no Radiation Alley, no Feds, no Resistance and no Lowell Industries. None of Obrin’s mistakes and none of mine,” he finished, and radiated relief. He’d found a way to absolve himself of everything.
Gina felt her skin crawl. Her life hadn’t exactly been a bed of roses back in the City, under the tender boot-heels of her father or the Federation at large, but the thought of wiping away those years was alien and abhorrent. They were a part of her. If they un-happened, she wouldn’t be Gina Hart anymore. She wouldn’t even be the real Emily Vaughan. She’d be someone, something else. Everything she was or would become would die here.
She struggled to find the words. “Gabriel, I– I know there’s been a lot of bad stuff going on, but you can’t just delete fifteen years of history.”
“Can’t, or shouldn’t?” he shot back.
“Both!”
Shaking his head, he said, “It’s been expensive, sure. Nanofactories and raw materials don’t come cheap. Impossible? No. I’m simply going to move a large number of molecules into a different position. It’s not time travel, and I’m sure it won’t be perfect, but it’ll work.”
“Please, don’t. There’s got to be another way.”
She took a few faltering steps toward him, thinking about the baby, about the words she desperately wanted to say but couldn’t get out of her throat. Would he even listen? Could anything change his mind?
He moved closer, stopping just an arm’s length away, and gazed into her eyes. “Who exactly are you trying to save, Gina? Yourself? Them? Me?”
“Everybody,” she insisted. The pressure inside her built up like a boiler containing too much steam. She strained and fought with the sick dread in her stomach. Tell him, she repeated to herself. Tell him, tell him, tell him now!
“You know, I’ve always liked that about you.” He gave her a small smile. “You’re a redeemer. You don’t give up on people. You inspire them to be better than they are, just by believing in them. Who else would still be here trying to save me from myself?”
He grabbed Obrin by the collar and pushed him toward the car waiting behind him. Then he made a sweeping gesture, inviting Gina to join him. “Come on. We have one more place to visit before the end.”
“Where?” was all she could think to ask.
“Where it all started,” he said. “Quantico.”